But in recent years, distractions have kept me from reading.  Oh, I’ve read books — maybe a handful a year — but no where near the volume that I once enjoyed.  Video games, television, blogs, podcasts and life in general have kept me from books. However, the advent of a new way to read books has radically changed that — I received an Amazon Kindle for Christmas, and I’ve found that the convenience of Kindle, coupled with the great ergonomics and UI have … uhm rekindled my interest in the written word.

There’s a vast library of titles available on Kindle, anytime, anywhere — even, though it may have shocked my mom, in the hinterlands of rural, mountainous western Maryland.  I’ve thus far purchased four books on Kindle — Finch by Jeff Vandermeer, Spook Country by William Gibson (for $2.52!), Boneshaker by Cherie Priest and Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson — and a monthly subscription to The Atlantic magazine ($1.25 per month). I’ve finished Finch and am incredibly close to finishing Boneshaker.  And I am likely to expand my Kindle library before I get to the other books currently on my list.

Cloud computing is one of the new buzzwords floating around the Internetosphere, and Kindle lives comfortably in the cloud.  I have Kindle PC installed on my computer at work, so at lunch I can read my Kindle books.  The great thing is that my Kindle and the Kindle PC app are synced — so Kindle PC knows where I last left off on Kindle and vice versa.  It’s an amazing thing to be able to access content anywhere at any time.  If I had an iPhone, I could access my Kindle books on that, too — though I’m hoping that Amazon gets around to making an Android app.

There is a part of me that misses physical books or browsing book stores, but there’s another part of me that enjoys the liberation of constant access to content.  Brick and mortar stores are great, but the downside is that they don’t always have what you want.  Kindle usually does.  It was the same thing for digital music — I got so tired of trekking to the local indie record store, only to find the record I wanted was out of stock.  Digital content is always available. I know a lot of people out there worry about DRM, about owning versus licensing.  Cory Doctorow gave an interesting lecture on the subject, but at the end of the day, it’s all semantics to me.  I’m selfish, I like convenience, and I really don’t care if I can loan a book out to a friend.  We live in a time where content has become separate from physical objects, the gap between the two widening every day. At the end of the day, I am much more interested in having access to content than I am in “owning” it.  The reality is that no one owns anything, anymore — the most we can hope for is credit for our own authorship.

Getting back to access, I have one more point to make about Kindle.  I remember in high school in Hagerstown, MD desperately wanting to read the latest literary novels. The traditional classics and mass market fiction — especially science fiction and fantasy — were widely available, but many contemporary literary works were not. I wanted to read books that were challenging and relevant to my life, but none of the places that carried them — not the used books stores (primarily focused on the bulk reselling of romance novels), or the Waldenbooks in the mall, or the public library had what I wanted.  It was extremely frustrating.  Many of my fellow city dwellers crying about the death of the bookstore and the downfall of the corrupt publishing business are so stuck up their own overeducated cosmopolitan asses  that they take for granted the amazing access they have to literature.  Kindle and other eReaders bring the best books to anyone, anywhere.  If that kind of access breaks the old paradigm of publisher gatekeepers and brick and mortar stores, then so be it.  We’re all the better for it.

UPDATE

My friend Steve Lee forwarded on this story about the state of the eReader market from Gizmondo.  I think given the pricepoint of tablets (Apple’s tablet is rumored to cost around $1,000), eBook readers will be around for awhile. Especially Kindle.